Love for Love

October 24, 2015

Back in the Swan for this delicious restoration comedy. After the Libertine last year (not exactly a restoration comedy but set in the same period) i have got a bit more into the language and theatricality of these plays. The revelation of working with Selina Cadell as a director, who is also a great comic actor, is how much she understands the relationship between the performer and the audience, the kind of stuff i bang on about with one room spaces and the shared air of actor and onlooker. In Selina’s world view this is made explicit , the actors are only there to serve the audience. There is no offstage naturalistic logic of where they have been before, where they have to enter from, instead they appear on stage because Congreve needs them to be there to drive the plot along and they are always in conversation with the audience. I throughly enjoyed Selina’s version of the rivals at the Arcola last year and we have taken some of that rough simplicity of theatrical improvisation into this production.It is a little difficult sometimes to get the RSC to accept a deliberately improvised slightly naff comic prop, but i think we are getting there now with a sense of a troop of actors who have left one theatre to open their new play, somewhat ill prepared, in a new home , as happened in Congreve’s time.Oh and did i mention we have a stuffed crocodile ?